


The City of the Sun

by Cloudfrost



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Adventure, F/F, Future, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, You'd better believe there'll be future lesbianism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 09:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudfrost/pseuds/Cloudfrost
Summary: The Doctor and Bill travel to far future Earth- but find that things are not as expected. The Doctor hopes to find answers in the city of Haya-min, where gardens grow on rooftops, black cats roam over temples of scavenged metal and monstrous creatures haunt the sea. However, when Bill meets the roof-gardener Aiko, she realises that time travel is far more complicated than she'd imagined.





	The City of the Sun

 

The heavy oak door creaked on its hinge as Bill peered into the Doctor’s office expectantly, never sure what she might find.

“Doctor?” Bill said. She looked around. A half-full cup of tea balanced precariously on the edge of the desk, but if Nardole was being stroppy that could’ve been there for days.

“Bill! Quick quick quick. In here. We’ve got about two minutes, I’ve distracted Nardole with the vault.”

“Oh, so she’s in the vault today, is she?” muttered Bill.

“Shut up. Get in.”

Bill pushed past the PULL TO ENTER sign and threw her bag over the railing. “This is a bad idea.”

“How so?”

“It’s  _ always  _ a bad idea. Are there any times in the universe when people aren’t getting, I dunno, shot at or eaten by monsters or something? Last time there were bloody interdimensional portal creatures  _ in Aberdeen.  _ They don’t even have a motorway in Aberdeen.”

“Oi.”

“Give it up, you’re not even really from Scotland. You’ve said enough about the South.” Despite herself, Bill grinned. “I suppose you’ll still be wanting my essay.”

“Yes please,” said the Doctor absentmindedly, fiddling with some sort of round control. He’d tried to explain all the controls to her once, and she had a basic idea, but she felt that that was getting away from the fundamental point: why, in a psychic time machine that could apparently change at will on the inside, have such a complicated way to fly it? 

Unless, of course, you liked showing off.

“Where do you want to go?” the Doctor asked. 

“You don’t have anywhere in mind?” 

He shook his head, a smile creeping onto his face. “More fun when you choose.”

“SIR-”

“Ah, there’s Nardole. I implied that I’d let Missy out.”

Bill raised an eyebrow. “Had you?”

“Not this time specifically, no,” the Doctor said. 

She let that go, for the sake of her sanity. “You know when we saw that colony in the future-”

“There were quite a few colony ships, over time,” said the Doctor. “Even when the Earth was being struck by solar flares, no one could agree on how to leave, or when. Or even if they should leave at all.” He snapped his fingers and the door made a clicking noise, followed by a low groan from outside.

“Sounds like the MPs.” Bill made a face. “But I was wondering- what’s Earth like in the future? Before the solar flares and all that, obviously,” she added. “Was it nice?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Nice, not nice- humans continued to be humans, in all the important ways.” He spun on his heels and punched a few keys without looking at them, then gestured to the lever dramatically. “7465, Common Era. Care to join me, Miss Potts?” 

Bill grinned. “Go on then.” She hopped off the rail where she was sat and put her hand next to his. The metal felt warm, and faintly vibrated in a way that was difficult to describe. “Sounds crazy, I know, but I think the TARDIS likes this.”

“I think you just may be right.” They slammed the lever down in unison, and the symbols began to move above their heads.

“What do they mean?” Bill pointed upwards.

“What, you mean the writing? That’s my language. Or my people’s, anyway.”

“Hold on, I thought the TARDIS does translation-”

Then a metal bar slammed into her stomach and her chest threatened to turn itself inside out.

“Oh, that’s not good . . .”

Bill grabbed the bar and held on for dear life as the TARDIS’ gravity reversed direction and tried to pull her somewhere in the vicinity of the far wall. The Doctor frantically grabbed the screen and stared at it, glued to the console. He’d somehow anticipated the violent jerk a millisecond before she did. “Hold on!” he called.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Bill yelled as another heave tried to send her onto the lower level. She was reminded that adventures with the Doctor tended only to be fun in retrospect, when you were fairly confident that you weren’t dead. Usually, while you were having them you wished you were drinking tea and watching  _ Love Island. _

(Although admittedly, whenever Bill found herself doing that with Moira, violent death almost became preferable.)

The TARDIS stopped with a resonant CLANG. Normal gravity reasserted itself. The Doctor stepped gingerly away from the controls, as though they might explode at any minute.

“What happened?”

“Well, we’ve . . . landed.”

“In the future?” 

The Doctor chewed on his thumb thoughtfully. “Maybe.” He glanced at the monitor- nothing but static. “Maybe not.”

“Right, so what you’re saying is, we could be anywhere in space and time.”

“Earth, I’m fairly certain. Spatial displacement can happen with time travel, but gravity affects the Time Vortex in such a way that you’ll just be sucked back into the gravity well of the nearest massive object, unless you’re putting a significant amount of energy into it.”

“You mean like because of Einstein? Gravity warps space-time?”

“A bit crude, but he was on the right track, yes.”

“So I can cross the ‘space’ part out. We could still be in any time period.”

“Essentially,” the Doctor admitted. He fiddled with the console and (very unscientifically) gave the screen a whack. It flickered back to life, showing a grassland which gave way to a swamp dotted with spindly, pale trees. 

“That’s not Bristol,” said Bill. “There is no way that’s Bristol.”

“That would be an extraordinary coincidence, since I set the coordinates for what is in your time called the Liadong Peninsula, in Liaoning Province of China.”

“If you could choose any time and any place to show me the future, why there? Is that where the capital of the world is going to be?” Bill asked. “I always thought it was stupid to have a capital of an entire planet in films. Like, the London ring road is bad enough.”

“No, although the congestion at the galactic centre was a  _ nightmare _ .” The Doctor flung open the doors, temporarily blinding Bill. “I may have owed a slight favour. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Although they wouldn’t exactly appreciate that metaphor, being ornithoid themselves.”

Bill shielded her eyes and stepped out. As soon as she was a few feet away from the door, a wave of heat hit her as though she was in a furnace. She really wished she hadn’t worn black skinny jeans today. As her eyes adjusted, everything looked faded and washed out in the intense light.

The Doctor turned one way, then the other. “Magnetic north is that way,” he said, pointing vaguely off towards a hazy blue line that Bill realised was the sea. “So . . .” He grabbed a tall, woody stalk of some sort of dead grass and planted it in the ground directly in front of him. “True north is a bit to the left. Not quite midday, but the angle of the sun seems about right for the latitude.”

“You can just do that?” asked Bill, fascinated. “You know where magnetic north is? I heard turtles can do that.” 

“You could learn a lot from turtles,” the Doctor told her. “They’ve been on your planet for over 220 million years, and never once invented reality television.”

He then bent down to scoop up some loose earth and placed a bit on his tongue, which was around the same time that Bill realised that she was lost in the future with a madman. She took a deep breath and lowered her eyelids.

The Doctor shook his head, rolling the dirt around his mouth with the careful discrimination of a wine taster. “That is not right.”

“Too right it isn’t,” Bill muttered under her breath.

And neither-” he pointed across the plain- “is that.”

Rectangular shapes which Bill had first taken for landforms revealed themselves to be buildings, hidden in plain sight, like the white vase revealing itself between two black faces. They seemed oddly hidden in greenery somehow, making them difficult to spot, but still unmistakably built by humans. And yet, Bill couldn’t help but feel a little cheated by the lack of flying cars or gleaming silver. “It’s not very . . . futuristic.”

“No,” the Doctor agreed grimly. “That was my thinking.”

“Did they ever do flying cars?” 

“Not on this Earth. People tried, but then they realised that it was a stupid idea.”

“We’re going to have to walk there, aren’t we?”

“Would you prefer to take the TARDIS in this state?”

“Fair enough.”

They fell into an uneasy silence as they walked. Bill could tell from the way that the Doctor’s eyebrows drew together that he had ideas, but he wasn’t going to share them with her just yet. She could feel the sun physically pounding onto her head, and did her best to ignore it- the more she thought about it, the worst it became. As they crested the top of the third rolling hill, only to gaze out over several more, the Doctor produced a water bottle of mysterious provenance from his jacket and handed it to her.

She took it gratefully, wondering if his pockets were bigger on the inside, or if men’s were just like that. “You got food in there too?”

He ignored that. “Look at this.”

For the first time, they could see the city clearly. Bill was immediately drawn to a large, pyramid-like structure, painted in gaudy ochre and yellow, which shone out amongst the rectangular earthen buildings. Literally shone- Bill realised that the edge of each brick on the pyramid was gilded with some sort of silvery metal. Most of the buildings were topped with plants, bright flowers and even twisted trees whose branches snaked down the walls and burrowed into cracks. 

“We’ve gone back in time, by accident,” said Bill in relief. “That’s all.”

The Doctor said slowly, “No, I don’t think so.”

“But you said-”

“I think-” the Doctor bit his thumb, which was how Bill knew that it was serious. “I think that we’re in entirely the right time, and the place. What we are  _ not  _ is _ - _ ”

“-we’re in the wrong timeline,” Bill realised. “That’s why the TARDIS was acting funny.” She pictured the two timelines like two railway tracks running alongside each other, the TARDIS a train skidding off the rails and joining the other.

“Not just that,” said the Doctor, seemingly anticipating her train image. “This is not an established, separate parallel universe. Our own timeline has recently been violently changed, and this is the result.”

“But what happened?” Bill gestured. “I don’t know what this is supposed to look like, but that’s not the kind of civilisation that goes to space, or makes AI, or any of the stuff that we’ve seen.”

“We can assume that the change in the timeline happens after 2017,” The Doctor began walking again, faster, moving his arms up and down with every word so that he looked even more penguin-like. Bill followed, her mind racing with a thousand possibilities. “I think it’s safe to assume an event triggering the collapse of global civilisation, although a slow decline is also possible. Beyond that, there are a thousand apocalypse scenarios- climate change, nuclear war, a deadly superbug, alien invasion, to name a few. Even just the stratification of wealth in society combined with the increase in automation would almost certainly have destroyed your civilisation, if you hadn’t made serious economic changes in the 2040s.”

“Yeah but what  _ exactly _ changed?” Bill pressed. “Because I know the world’s a pretty shitty place right now, but we stopped all of that, right?”

The Doctor sighed. “Not all of it. A lot of people suffered in the process.” He furrowed his eyebrows. “Changes like this are normally caused by time travellers, and this time I’m almost positive it wasn’t me.”

“This time?”

“Look, you can’t swim without creating some ripples. Or- very occasionally- tidal waves,” he admitted. “My people had a very strong policy against interfering in the timeline, for these sorts of reasons. But then they effectively installed themselves as dictators of the spacetime continuum and sat about in towers wearing stupid hats, so look where that got them. The timeline is constantly in flux in lots of little ways, because the universe is unpredictable. I’ve taught you about solipsism?”

“The idea that nothing exists except yourself, because I can’t prove that you’re not in my imagination,” Bill recalled. “I can say that’s not true right now. There’s no way I could come up with any of this stuff.”

The Doctor chuckled. “In a surprising way, that’s true of time. There’s no such thing as objective ‘reality’- in a sense, your own personal timeline and your perception of the universe is the only thing that’s real. Now my question to you is this: I can remember things that never happened, but does my memory mean that they did?”


End file.
